Are you prepared to service the DRTV market?

Telemarketing, Nov 1995 by Stoller, Sheldon

You've heard the direct response TV (DRTV) market could be a lucrative venture for your service agency and you're ready to take the plunge. Or are you? The key to success is knowing what to expect and having the correct resources in place.

Today's consumer is bombarded every day, night, week and month with thousands of impressions of the miracle mop, Elvis videos, CDs and the wonder widget that they just have to have or their lives will never be the same. If you don't believe me, subject yourself to an hour or two of late-night TV and I guarantee you will encounter a message that says, "To order, credit card customers call 1-800-INSTANT response."

Ah yes, the commercial: 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 30 minutes. (Hopefully it will never exceed 30 minutes. After all, who in their right mind would subject himself/herself to more than 30 minutes of straight commercials?) The truth is, hundreds of thousands of people are motivated to make purchases through the miracle of television advertising. Do the products they buy work? "Absolutely, and they come with a 30-day money-back guarantee." At least that's what your operators had better say when they are asked.

DRTV promotions have run the gamut from the good, the bad to the ugly, with little rhyme or reason for their success or failure. Sure, you can try to justify, quantify and qualify why a particular DRTV promotion was successful, but it is most often not easily explained. If it were, you'd always know what would work and what wouldn't, but that's not reality.

Erratic Response

When someone asks me what I think their DRTV response will be, I tell them my crystal ball is currently in the shop under repair, so their guess is as good as mine.

Let's look at some examples of DRTV advertising results. In a local market of approximately 500,000 people, I've seen call volumes in response to a 30- or 60-second spot draw only 8 to 10 callers. On the other hand, there have been extraordinarily successful programs that have delivered as many as 50 to 60 responses, but they have been few and far between. That doesn't mean that in a market of 1 to 5 million there is a linear relationship and you should expect 20 to 100 calls. In fact, the relationship can be quite the opposite. Furthermore, if you evaluate the response on a cable, national, or satellite network, the results are as unpredictable as the weather. The bad news is by the time you figure out the calling patterns, there are changes to the airtime, the commercial, the pricing, the frequency, the product, and who knows what else.

What am I saying? When your call center moves into servicing the DRTV market, you had better be prepared to expect the unexpected. Crucial questions, such as the following, need to be addressed. Do you have a sufficient number of trunks and operators? How many calls might be abandoned? How will this affect other clients? Can you schedule extra staff for the first few airing dates? What if nobody calls? What if too many people call and can't get through? Will they call back? Will you lose the account? It's enough to make you go gray, lose your hair, and your marbles.

The secret is never to take on more than you can handle. If you always deliver the same level of good service, your customers and your customers' customers will love you. So take little bites. Try a small market, then a larger market, then a larger market still. The problem, as I see it, is the conundrum that faces many small- to medium-sized call center service agencies. They are too big to be small and too small to be big.

When you staff 30 to 50 seats and you have a mixed account client base, you are ready to try DRTV. When you have hundreds of seats, dependent on your mix of clients, you still may not be in a better position to take on DRTV. But the odds are in your favor with a larger center. It all boils down to operator availability.

The Pitfalls Of Staffing

If you haven't been discouraged by now, here's the final straw. Most DRTV customers pay for their advertising on a per-inquiry basis. That means that the station gets a percentage of the sale as a commission on the sale of the product, or per inquiry. Sounds pretty good so far, but the bad news is you may never know when the commercials are going to run. It could be 10 a.m., 10 p.m. or 3 a.m., when most of the world is sleeping--except for your call center operators.

The Successes

For every successful DRTV product there are probably 50 that fail. When you have excess capacity for more calls most of the time, and you can expand your DRTV clients to the point where there are dozens or hundreds of offers simultaneously active, there is a good chance DRTV will fit nicely into your service mix. The odds are in your favor of local channels advertising competitive products at the same time back to back. The odds are also low of national ads and local ads interfering with each other. When your DRTV accounts are your primary source of calls, these odds could start to work against you. Hopefully by then you will have sorted out your staff requirements and it won't be an issue.